The Google Business Profile checklist

A Google Business Profile is the highest-return free asset a local business owns, and most of the ones I open are about half filled in. The categories are wrong, the service list is empty, there are four photos from 2019, and nobody has answered a review in a year.

This is the whole checklist, sixty items, in the order I work through them. It takes about three hours the first time. Everything here is free, and you do not need us or anyone else to do it.

To get in: search “my business” in Google while signed in to the account that owns the profile, or open the listing in Google Maps and use the owner controls. Google moved single-location management out of a separate dashboard and into Search and Maps directly, so if you are hunting for the old console, that is why you cannot find it.

What actually decides where you show up?

Google says local ranking comes down to three things: relevance, distance, and prominence. That framing is worth memorizing because it tells you which checklist items matter.

Relevance is what your categories, services, and description say you do. Distance is how far your verified address is from the person searching, and you cannot change it. Prominence is reviews, links, mentions, and how established you are.

Distance is the reason a business in Burnsville will not consistently outrank a Maple Grove business in Maple Grove, no matter how good the profile is. Understanding that up front will save you from buying something that cannot work. There is a longer explanation of how the map results get assembled in the guide to ranking in the Google map pack.

Section 1: Claim and verify

1. Search your business name plus city in Google Maps and confirm whether a profile already exists. Someone may have created one for you, or Google may have generated it automatically.
2. If a profile exists and you do not control it, click “Claim this business” and work through the ownership request. If another person claimed it, Google gives you a conflict process. It is slow, so start it today.
3. If no profile exists, create one. Use the exact legal or trading name you use on your signage, invoices, and website.
4. Complete verification. Most businesses now get video verification, where you record a continuous walkthrough showing your signage, your equipment or workspace, and yourself with proof you manage the business. Read Google’s on-screen requirements before you start recording, because a failed attempt costs days.
5. Add a second owner or a manager. If one person leaves and takes the login, recovering an unverified-to-you profile is genuinely painful.
6. Turn on two-step verification for the Google account that owns it.

Section 2: Core business information

7. Business name: exactly your real name, no keywords. “Smith Plumbing” is fine. “Smith Plumbing - Emergency Drain Repair Minneapolis” is a guideline violation and the single easiest thing a competitor can report.
8. Address entered exactly as the post office writes it, matching the address on your website footer and your other listings, down to the suite number.
9. Phone number: a local number, not just a toll-free one, and the same number that appears on your website.
10. Website URL pointing to your homepage, ending with a trailing slash, with no redirect in the way. If the profile links to http://example.com and that bounces through two redirects to https://www.example.com/, fix it to the final URL.
11. Hours, including the days you are closed. Blank hours are worse than short hours.
12. Special hours for every holiday. Set them a year out in one sitting. Nothing costs you a customer faster in Minnesota than “open” on a day the office is closed for snow, Eid, or the day after Thanksgiving.
13. Opening date, if you know it.
14. Appointment or booking link, if you have one.

Should you show your address or hide it?

This is the fork in the road, and getting it wrong is the most common self-inflicted suspension.

	Storefront (address visible)	Service-area business (address hidden)
Who it is for	Customers come to you: clinic, school, mosque, restaurant, event center, law office with a reception area	You go to customers: home care, cleaning, trucking, mobile therapy, contractors
Address on profile	Shown publicly	Hidden, but you still enter it privately for verification
Service areas	Optional	Required, up to 20
Common mistake	Listing a coworking desk, virtual office, or mailbox	Leaving a home address visible

If nobody can walk in during your posted hours and be served, you are a service-area business. Enter your real address for verification, then clear it from public display and define your service areas.

A hidden address does not remove you from local results and does not reduce your ranking. It changes what the public sees, not what Google knows.

15. Choose storefront or service-area honestly.
16. If service-area, list the cities or ZIP codes you actually serve, up to twenty. Adding all twenty does not make you rank in all twenty.
17. If storefront, confirm the map pin is on your actual door. Drag it if Google dropped it in the parking lot or on the wrong side of the building.

Section 3: Categories, the highest-leverage field on the page

Your primary category does more for relevance than everything else on the profile combined. It tells Google which set of searches you are eligible for at all. Secondary categories add smaller amounts of relevance and can dilute you if you pile them on.

Two rules: pick the most specific category that genuinely describes your main revenue, and never add a category for a service you do not actually deliver. Category names also change, so type your term into the field and take what Google offers rather than assuming a name exists.

Business	Primary category	Reasonable secondary categories	The mistake
Web design studio	Website designer	Graphic designer, Software company	Choosing “Marketing agency” because it sounds bigger
Home care agency	Home health care service	Nursing agency, if you employ nurses	Choosing “Assisted living facility,” which means a building people live in
Charter school	Charter school	Elementary school, Middle school	Choosing the generic “School” or, worse, “Private school”
Law firm	The practice area: Immigration attorney, Personal injury attorney, Family law attorney	Law firm, plus a second practice area you truly run	Choosing “Law firm” alone and competing with every attorney in the metro
Restaurant	The most specific cuisine that exists in Google’s list	Halal restaurant, Takeout restaurant, Caterer	Choosing “Restaurant”
Mosque	Mosque	Islamic center, Religious organization	Splitting into separate profiles for the masjid and its school at one address

A note for Minnesota providers: Google’s category list is coarser than Minnesota licensing. There is no category that maps neatly to a 245D waiver provider or a PCA agency, so pick the closest honest fit and carry the precise language in your services and description instead. The same is true for autism and behavioral health services, where the practical answer is usually the specific clinical category plus a services list that spells out ABA, speech, and OT. We write about that in more depth on the autism and disability services website design page.

18. Set your primary category to the most specific accurate option.
19. Add two to five secondary categories, and no more.
20. Search the categories your top three competitors use, visible in the profile snippet under their name, and see whether one of them is a better primary than yours.

Section 4: Services, description, and attributes

21. Add every service as a service item, with a short description on each. If Google offers preset services for your category, take them, then add custom ones for anything missing.
22. Price the services if you are comfortable publishing prices. We publish ours on the pricing page, and it filters out mismatched inquiries before anyone spends time on a call.
23. Write the business description, up to 750 characters. Lead with what you do and who you serve. It does not appear to be a ranking factor, but people read it.
24. Do not stuff the description with city names. It reads badly and does nothing.
25. Set every applicable attribute: wheelchair accessible entrance, accepts new patients, women-owned, veteran-owned, LGBTQ+ friendly, on-site parking, languages spoken. Attributes appear as filters in Maps, so this is one of the few places where a checkbox creates real visibility.
26. For anyone serving the East African community in the Twin Cities, the languages attribute is worth more than most SEO tactics. If your staff speaks Somali, Oromo, or Amharic, say so here.
27. Add products if the format fits, for example programs at a school or packages at a clinic.

Section 5: Photos and video

Photos are what people actually look at. Treat them as a storefront window rather than an SEO field.

28. Upload a square logo and a wide cover photo.
29. Add at least ten interior and exterior photos taken on a real phone in daylight. Stock photography is obvious and it undercuts you.
30. Photograph the exterior from the direction people drive in, so they recognize the building.
31. Add photos of the team, with permission. For care, therapy, and school profiles, faces convert far better than facilities.
32. Add one short video, 30 seconds or less.
33. Geotagging photos does nothing. Skip it.
34. Set a recurring reminder to add a handful of new photos every month. Recency shows.

Section 6: Posts

35. Publish a post at least monthly. Use the update format for news, the event format for anything with a date, and the offer format only when there is a genuine offer.
36. Write a real sentence, add one image, and use a button that goes to a specific page on your site, not the homepage.

Posts are not a proven ranking factor. They matter because they fill space on your profile with something current, and because a person deciding between you and two competitors sees that you are open, active, and staffed.

Section 7: Questions and answers

37. Read the existing Q&A. Anyone can answer a question about your business, including people who are wrong.
38. Post and answer your own questions. This is allowed. Seed five to eight real ones: parking, insurance accepted, service area, languages, wait times, whether you take walk-ins.
39. Turn on notifications so a new question does not sit unanswered for a month. Unanswered questions on a profile read like an unanswered phone.

Section 8: Reviews

Reviews are the part of prominence you can influence, and they are the part most owners avoid.

40. Get your short review link from the profile and save it somewhere you can reach in two seconds.
41. Ask in person, at the moment the work is done, then follow with a text containing the link. Asking by email alone gets a fraction of the response.
42. Never offer anything of value in exchange for a review. It violates Google’s policy and it will eventually get the reviews stripped.
43. Never buy reviews. It is detectable and the cleanup costs more than the reviews were worth.
44. Reply to every review, positive and negative, within a few days. Two sentences is enough.
45. For negative reviews, reply once, calmly, without arguing the facts publicly, and move it to a phone call. Future customers are reading your temperament, not the dispute.
46. If you are in health care, disability services, or therapy, get a real policy in writing about what staff can and cannot say in a public reply. HIPAA does not pause because a review is unfair, and confirming that someone was a client is itself a disclosure.

Section 9: Messaging, booking, and the buttons people press

Google retired in-profile chat messaging and call history in 2024, so the chat button most articles still reference is gone. Check what your own dashboard offers, because Google changes this often.

47. Add a booking or appointment link if you take appointments. Use your real scheduler, not a contact page.
48. Make sure the phone number rings somewhere staffed during your posted hours. Half of what a profile earns you is calls, and a voicemail box loses most of them.
49. Confirm the mobile experience of your website link. Most profile traffic is on a phone, and if your site takes six seconds to load you have paid for that click and thrown it away.

Section 10: Track it, or you are guessing

By default, traffic from your profile blends into the rest of your organic search traffic and you cannot separate it. Tag the links.

Profile field	URL to enter
Website	https://example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp
Appointment link	https://example.com/contact/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp-booking
Services or menu link	https://example.com/services/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp-services
Post buttons	https://example.com/page/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp-post-march

Use utm_medium=organic rather than something custom like gbp. GA4 sorts sessions into channels using the source and medium pair, and a medium it does not recognize lands the traffic in “Unassigned,” which is exactly the invisibility you were trying to fix. Keeping the medium as organic holds it in the Organic Search channel while the campaign name lets you filter to the profile.

50. Tag all four link types.
51. Confirm the tagged URL loads without a redirect. Trailing slashes matter on our stack and on plenty of others.
52. Check the profile’s built-in performance data monthly for calls, direction requests, and website clicks.
53. Verify your site is actually indexed, because a profile pointing at an invisible website wastes the click. The site: check for whether Google has your website takes sixty seconds.

Tagging the URL has no effect on rankings. Google resolves it to the same page.

What gets a profile suspended?

Suspensions come in two flavors. A soft suspension leaves the listing visible but strips your ownership. A hard suspension removes it from Maps entirely, and every review goes with it.

The causes I see most often:

• Keywords added to the business name field.
• A virtual office, mailbox service, coworking desk, or registered agent address used as the business address.
• A service-area business leaving a residential address publicly visible.
• Two profiles at one address for what is really one business, or one profile per service.
• Editing name, address, and category all in the same session on an established listing. Change one thing, wait a week, change the next.
• The website field pointing to a lead-generation page or a social profile rather than the business’s own site.
• A category that does not match the business, especially in regulated fields.
• Ownership transferred to a brand new Google account with no history.

If you get suspended, do not create a second profile. That compounds it. File the reinstatement request, attach a photo of exterior signage, your business license or Secretary of State registration, and a utility bill at the address.

The monthly maintenance list

Thirty minutes, once a month:

54. Add three to five new photos.
55. Publish one post.
56. Reply to every new review.
57. Answer any new questions.
58. Check for “updates from Google” edits to your hours, category, or name and revert anything wrong. Google and the public can both suggest changes.
59. Update holiday hours for the next 60 days.
60. Glance at calls, clicks, and direction requests versus the previous month.

When you should not pay anyone for this

If you have not done the list above, do not hire a local SEO retainer. Ours runs $500 to $2,000 a month, and spending it on a profile with two photos and no service list is buying someone else’s afternoon at a markup. The categories, the attributes, the services, the review link, the UTM tags: all free, all yours, all doable by whoever answers your phone.

Hire help when one of three things is true. You have finished the checklist and stalled against real competitors in a dense market like Minneapolis. You have multiple locations or practitioners and the listing structure itself is the problem. Or your website is the bottleneck, which is what we usually find when a profile performs well and the phone still does not ring.

That last one is the honest pattern. A well-built profile can only send people to your website. If the site is slow, unclear about what you do, or missing the pages the profile promises, the profile is doing its job and the website is losing the lead. We see it constantly with home care agencies, schools, and law firms that ranked fine and converted badly.

If you want the background on how the map results and the rest of local search fit together, start with the plain-English explanation of local SEO.

Work the list. If you finish it and you are still stuck, tell us what you are seeing and we will tell you whether the problem is the profile, the website, or the competition, and whether it is worth paying anyone to fix.